Daniel Day-Lewis once named his favourite young actors
With a resumé as pristine as Daniel Day-Lewis, it’s hard to think of another actor so spectacularly transformative and selective with his roles. Rivalled perhaps only by Joaquin Phoenix, the knighted English actor is notorious for his commitment to authenticity, immersing in the ‘method’ school of acting and working with only the best and brightest filmmakers.
Paul Thomas Anderson must feel pretty smug about having nabbed both of them twice for his movies. Although he technically made his feature film debut as an uncredited child actor in the 1971 British drama Sunday Bloody Sunday, it wasn’t until the early 1980s that Day-Lewis would start putting serious credits on his CV, turning in supporting roles in the likes of Richard Attenborough’s Ghandi and starring alongside Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins in The Bounty.
But it was My Beautiful Laundrette, released in 1985, that set the acclaimed actor on the meteoric path of stardom that has led him to now – retired but with an exquisite filmography to his name. When he starred in the fantastic 2017 movie Phantom Thread, it marked his second collaboration with Anderson and his final film before a self-imposed exit from the acting world.
He retired with exactly 20 films in his catalogue, having worked with some of the most significant directors, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, James Ivory and Michael Mann. He left the mantle ready to be taken up by the next generation of young actors. But the question was, who? In an interview with Port magazine, the highly revered actor revealed that he had a pretty good guess.
Assembling the list, however, proved something of a daunting task. “I’m gathering all these things to me like a crazy hoarder, arms around them, fingers clasped, sweeping them towards me, penning them under the roof of this magazine,” Day-Lewis said, comparing himself further to “a flailing game show winner given three minutes to ransack the shelves of their favourite department store, who now sits panting on the floor to examine the surprising sum-total of their plunder.”
Goodness gracious – I wonder if anyone ever told Day-Lewis that he could also be a writer? Besides listing some bonafide classics that he revered, including the likes of Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, and Laurence Olivier, his wide-cast net also encompassed some slightly more obscure names – actors like Essex-born Philip Davis and the oft-forgotten old Hollywood icon Montgomery Clift.
When it came to up-and-comers, there was one whom he’d shared the screen multiple times with, most notably There Will Be Blood – Paul Dano. Speaking about Dano in an interview with Chicago Movie Mag, he said, “I think he’s undoubtedly one of the most promising young actors working at the moment.” Beyond Dano, two more younger actors managed to grace the list of Day-Lewis’s ones to watch… In that same interview, the actor said, “There’s a few really good ones… Emile Hirsch and Ryan Gosling. I don’t know if Ryan is a little bit older, but they’re more or less part of the same generation, wonderful actors.”
